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praptak a day ago

It would have to handle chargebacks and resolve disputes.

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qingcharles 20 hours ago | parent | next [-]

That's what escrow is for?

Places like swapd that operate on crypto escrow every transaction to lessen these crypto problems.

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mistercheph a day ago | parent | prev [-]

Those are functions of a marketplace, a low-cost pseudo-legal system so that you hopefully avoid using a state's costly and slow legal system. But if marketplaces also own the medium of exchange, e.g. marketplaces that issue tokens and only allow transacting in tokens (Paypal behind the scenes), their economic incentive is not to resolve disputes, but to create as many barriers as possible to converting tokens back into value as they can get away with, since this becomes the profit center of the business.

And, when the only medium of exchange available to consumers and merchants is through one of these tokenized marketplaces, getting locked out of marketplaces means getting locked out of doing business entirely with no recourse or alternative.

Mediums of exchange should be neutral, and self-sovereign exchange has to be an option in order for marketplaces to offer competitive marketplace services, else they just abuse their monopoly on medium of exchange.

It's pretty nice, e.g. that when I buy a leash, it doesn't also have to walk the dog. Maybe for some, it's ideal to have someone else walk the dog, and the dog walker can even insist on bringing their own leash, but having the option of buying my own leash, putting it on my dog, and walking it myself means I don't need anyone's permission to own a dog, (not a big deal in the case of dog-walkers since there are so many) and substantially lowers the premium that dog-walkers can command in the marketplace for their services.

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praptak 20 hours ago | parent | next [-]

"If only there was a technology which fixes this..."

"Those are functions of a marketplace"

Then it seems you should have said "If only there was a technology and a marketplace which fixes this..."

And no, it doesn't exist because handling disputes is a hard problem. It's the actual moat of PayPal (and credit card companies) and the reason why they can get away with their crappy behaviour.

	▲	mistercheph 19 hours ago \| parent [-]
		The comment I responded to said: > No clue what I did, no recourse, now locked out of a fuckton of global marketplaces and peer to peer transactions that uniquely only work on a platform like PayPal. I am not saying there is a single technology that is completely at parity without paypal without the problems, I'm saying that there is a technology which can give you access to global marketplaces and peer-to-peer transacting if you are locked out of the paypal/CC system. And the payment processors don't have a moat in their sophistication in dispute resolution. This is a hard problem, but a solvable one if you have lots of liquidity: e.g Amazon, AliExpress. Their moat is having lots of liquidity, regulatory capture, and network effects.

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vkou 21 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

The problem is that there are two parties in any transaction, and power users/casual users swayed by marketing will be the ones that will choose the medium on which the transaction will take place.

So while you may want a self-sovereign exchange, your counterparty doesn't give a shit about your preferences, or is actively happy with using PayPal (Because their dispute resolution is better biased towards their side of the transaction, or because they just never gave it a second thought.)

	▲	mistercheph 20 hours ago \| parent [-]
		One can argue about the difficulty of overcoming network effects to make mediums of exchange viable until the cows come home but that's orthogonal to the issue GP raised and ultimately impossible to predict. As a counterpoint to the rhetorical impossibility of a challenger overcoming an incumbent (in almost all subjects this is true, despite challengers in the world regularly overcoming incumbents), exchange rates indicate markets are positive about the network effect threshold being overcome, since if it is impossible to overcome, the value of all cryptocurrencies combined is approximately 0.